Tehama Rooms

Tehama had a concept of ‘rooms’ which were essentially virtual offices where staff were added and provided desktops.

Throughout our regular touchpoints with customers, we learned that they were struggling to find information about rooms in the tool. This feedback helped explain several recordings of end users bouncing around in the UI. It was not clear to us while watching these recordings what tasks the customers were trying to complete.

It seemed the information architecture in the tool didn’t align with our customers’ expectations. We needed to learn what they considered important and determine how we might improve the UX.

Methods

To learn more, I conducted a book jacket design exercise which, as the name suggests, had customers list points of interest regarding rooms and placed them on a book jacket diagram to reflect their importance. For example, participants typically placed information along the spine of the book jacket if they felt it was helpful in distinguishing one room from another.

The book jacket metaphor allowed the participants to step away from web design solutions and focus solely on how they would prioritize certain points of information over others.

The exercise was conducted with several different customers at separate touchpoints. Once completed, I grouped related items to refine the information gathered from the different sources.

Insights

It became clear that our customers shared common points of interest regarding rooms and had them ranked similarly.

Some assumptions were confirmed but also a lot of interesting new insights appeared. One notable insight was that most of our customers struggled with identifying rooms as they grew in numbers. This resulted in end users having difficulty finding information.

We also learned that rooms were created with a specific purpose in mind. Some were created for a particular project, some for departments within the company, and some were built to support a specific region of users. To help identify the purpose of a room, customers named their rooms with elaborate naming conventions.

Ideation

We reviewed the insights among product and engineering teams to discuss how we might be able to provide solutions. Together, we identified quick wins that might deliver lots of value with minimal effort.

We talked about revising the ‘rooms list’ page to include more pertinent information as well as providing the customer a means to describe their rooms. During a cross-department review, we learned that this concept was already handled in the database but it was never implemented in the UI. This became an intriguing candidate for a high value with minimum effort solution.

Additionally, we updated the UI in the rooms list to display more pertinent information based on our research. This meant replacing some columns with brand new information to display on the 'spine' of the 'book'.

Measurement

UX Outcomes

Prior to the release, we studied room naming conventions so we could recognize whether the new feature would result in customers renaming their rooms as interviews had suggested.

Events for adding/editing/deleting room names and descriptions were added to the database in order for us to track outcomes in various tools. We determined that if a certain number of customers had added room descriptions, we’d consider that a checkpoint for success.

A Likert scale survey was added within the tool to capture feedback on the enhancements.

There was immediate adoption by one of our largest customers within hours of the release.

New rooms were created with custom descriptions which demonstrated the feature was being adopted but it also provided us a clearer understanding of how rooms were being leveraged.

It was evident that new rooms were being created with less complicated naming conventions indicating that the inclusion of descriptions as well as other pertinent data points surfaced in the rooms list made an impact.